


and you were singing me

by magisterequitum



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-06 23:42:47
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,597
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741552
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/pseuds/magisterequitum
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>she finds another way; she finds again her best weapon.</p><p>(S4 AU where Elena finds someone else to help her with the sire bond; warnings for consent issues that go with the sire bond, and character death)</p>
            </blockquote>





	and you were singing me

Every night she goes to bed even more tired than the last. Her days are spent going through the motions now, and even if she wanted to stay awake, she’s not allowed to. Her body thrums with energy that’s never given any outsource. She does the motions anyway. Brush her teeth. Clean her face. Pull her hair from the elastic, brush it out. Turn the lights off. Get in bed. Tuck arms under comforter. And it’s the same thing every night.

She goes to bed and wonders how she got here some nights. She can still taste the silty water in the back of her throat. Her brain tells her to be quiet, to stop thinking, to rest, to close her eyes. The voice sounds a lot like Damon.

She thinks her room even smells like the creek. Or maybe not.

 

 

 

_The abandoned house looks even more decrepit this time around. The wallpaper peels down in uneven strips, light filtering in amber shades that turn the room muted and soft. She lifts a hand and touches dust motes she shouldn’t be able to even see._

_“Where is the moonstone?”_

_A loud gasp and she looks to see her once necklace where its been tossed to the floor. No noise comes from her. It’s her though. Just not her._

_She struggles to understand, her head feeling thick like she has a cold._

_“With Katherine. Under the church.”_

_An easy motion of his hand, words still being exchanged. Her skin aches where she watches him grab her arm and carry-drag her away._

_Trevor’s head stays behind._

 

 

 

Some days she finds herself questioning what she’s doing, what the words coming out of her mouth mean and how they formulated themselves in the first place, why she says them.

Her head feels fuzzy now. Like when she’d been younger and spent one July with a summer cold.

She reminds herself that vampires can’t get summer colds.

 

 

 

_Her bedroom is more inviting than when she’d gone to sleep in it. She feels safer, more comfortable, relaxed._

_She blinks and she’s standing in the corner, only she’s in the middle of the room too._

_“There’s something else I need for you to do for me.”_

_She speaks so confidently. So sure and direct. She’s not certain when the last time she ever sounded like that._

_“Are you negotiating?”_

_She’s watching this other her speak in the reflection of her standing mirror. It’s like a film reel being spun out, focus coming and going. She squints, willing the scene, whatever this is, to be clearer._

_Dark eyes swing to meet hers in the mirror, a breakaway from the script._

_She gasps and her eyes open._

 

 

 

Elena wants to scream when she finds out that Jeremy’s mark has been activated. The noise and rage and despair sit heavy on her tongue, ready to fall, but it won’t. It can’t push its way out. She’s drowning, trapped again underwater by a few specific choice words that force her brain to shut down against her complaints.

The blood from where Jeremy had tried to kill her trickles down her neck and all she can do is stand there with a heavy tongue.

 

 

 

_The lake house is eerie._

_Mist, twisting in silver-gray spindly fingers creeps across the ground. An owl hoots a warning somewhere in the trees. Wind picks up and causes the hair on her arms to rise._

_There’s a rust brown stain on the front porch. Seeped into the wood. It looks like a palm tree if she tilts her head just so to the left. “I’m sorry,” she says to the blood._

_“Elena.”_

_Her name and she looks up. She’s not on the porch anymore. She’s on the gravel that’s where the cars sit, standing beside a man whose duplicate body is being lowered to the wood, bleeding and held by her._

_Her eyes are huge when she looks to him next to her. She doesn’t need a mirror to know that. She can feel the stretching of the skin around her eyes, the air that hits her pupils. “What is this?”_

_Something hits her as he opens his mouth to answer. She’s left with the burning calculated look from his dark eyes._

 

 

 

Damon’s hand is heavy on her naked hip. Clumsy and part of her wants to sink back into the bed and part of her wants to run from the room. She has neither option that she can actually choose. The boarding house confines her, trapping her in and her throat closes over with dry wanting sobs. She hates everything about it and its owners then.

Her name murmured from the person next to her. It’s not the voice she wants to hear it from. It’s not a voice that can help her.

She settles back down and tries to think.

 

 

 

_Nothing happens the next time she sleeps. Free floating blackness. She wonders if this is how Katherine felt in the tomb as her body shut down too._

 

 

 

The lake house is livelier this time around. She sinks into the assured weight of Bonnie and nearly cries when Jeremy can hug her with both hands empty; she wants to hold him tight and the nightmare of Connor still wraps around her.

Her eyes track the professor around the room. Her brain tells her it’s fine. Her gut and nose tell her something else.

She keeps her thoughts to herself and smiles when they look at her.

 

 

 

_She yelps in excitement when she opens her eyes and finds herself sitting at her dining table. A smile spreads itself across her face and she’s so happy she very nearly misses the person sitting beside her._

_“Elena.”_

_She swings her head to the left and her lips curve upward to reveal teeth. “Elijah.” It’s nearly a sigh._

_He studies her, that same calculating look from nights ago. His face is hard and still. Finally, he blinks and inclines his head to her. “Do you know what you are doing?”_

_She falters and blinks. Confusion and suddenly she’s back underwater again. “I,” her voice falters, forehead scrunching._

_His hand clamps down hard on her wrist, fingers biting into her flesh and bones, crushing them in her grip. She can hear them grind. The pain flares, but it grounds her here._

_“I’m dreaming,” she gasps, wanting to pull away instinctively but knowing not to._

_He nods._

_She thinks back, struggling to slot the film reel in the correct order. He’s so finely contained next to her and she’s falling apart seam by seam, with each thread tugged by another who wants something from her. “I brought you here. I pulled you into here.”_

_Elijah nods again. His fingers remain tight around her wrist while his eyes never leave from staring her down. “What is wrong?”_

_She nearly wails in anger and frustration. The film is suddenly exposed to light, ruined and the trap closes. “I can’t tell you.”_

 

 

 

For one brief moment she’s thankful for Rebekah’s compulsion. Irony that her head only becomes clear briefly when she’s told against what to do against her will.

For one brief moment she can see.

And she hates in those few seconds.

Hates that she’s alone having to win the right to her body; redux, rewind, replay, remix.

Hates that she looks at Rebekah’s power and hope, desperate hope and longing that she recognizes and wants so much.

Hates that she can then and see then all that has been done to her.

Hates that it only lasts for a few seconds before words spill out that aren’t entirely of her own creation; half truth, half lie.

 

 

 

_She doesn’t even get the chance to formulate and picture what she wants before she opens her eyes and already is somewhere._

_The room is a den or study, similar to the one her father used. She marvels at the clarity of the room. She can see the titles of the books on the shelves. “Is this where you are?” She asks him where he sits ankles-crossed on the couch. “You pulled me here.” She casts her eyes up to the ceiling. “You’re sleeping right now.” None of those are questions and it’s funny somehow to think of Elijah sleeping._

_She can feel his gaze on her, right between her shoulder blades, as she trails her fingers across the spines of the books. “Just as you are sleeping elsewhere. I have a bit more finesse at this.”_

_It’s not lost on her that this should be terrifying. Invading someone’s mind and pulling them into your own. She knows it’s been done to her before. She’s not sure how she figured out how to do it._

_“You’re not taking vervain,” he comments._

_“I stopped. He didn’t tell me I had to.” She touches a first edition of Anna Karenina._

_“Who?”_

_She shakes her head._

_“You can’t tell me that?”_

_She nods._

_The exhale from his nose some might call irritation and annoyance._

_She turns and her gaze focuses on the chessboard resting on the coffee table. Her legs are quick, her fingers already reaching for the jade pieces, dropping down to sit across from him._

_He follows her movement and stares at the curved spine of the horse’s head. His eyebrow rises, mouth quirking into a sneer at the corner. “The Salvatores.”_

_Elena sighs in relief that he remembers the off hand deriding comment he’d made about them being useful as her knights alone to keep them alive. She sets the piece down on the board. Her hand hovers over the tallest piece of the set, her mouth tightening and tongue swiping her bottom lip. She grips the queen and a pawn together and places them in the middle._

_The Queen makes a dull thud when it falls sideways from her fingers._

 

 

 

“I don’t want it,” Elena shouts. She points a hand over to where another dead vampire now rests on the ground. “You think I want it if you’re doing this to Jeremy?”

“It’s for you, Elena, for your own good. It’s the way to break it.” Damon tells her and she can already feel the fight seeping from her, her mind telling her to relax at his words. Her gums ache and her hands flex to fight. All this strength that she can’t use.

Stefan nods his head too.

You’re killing him, she wants to say. You’re killing me.

 

 

 

_She freezes, finding herself with her hands raised in opening waltz position. Their palms are separated by inches. She looks down to see herself wearing a green dress that sits in the back of her closet and hasn’t been seen in months._

_His eyebrows cocks an inch at her, his hand still, waiting as if on pause._

_She presses her hand to his and moves his other to her waist where it should be. She’s not sure if she can conjure music in this set, but she moves her feet regardless. “The Lockwood’s throw a Christmas party every year. This was the last one before my parents died. I danced with my father. Mom even got Jeremy to dance with her.” Jeremy had danced with her later too._

_Elijah doesn’t comment, and for that she’s grateful, but he does follow her steps; he doesn’t lead._

_She realizes then that he’s touching her. Touch that she initiated of her own mind, of her own volition, free from anything else. It makes her both want to cry and smile._

_“Kol tells me that you all are after a cure.”_

_Elena nods her head and leads them around the Lockwood’s empty ballroom._

_His mouth tightens and he looks so very old then. Old and angry and disappointed. “How incredibly foolish.”_

_She sniffs._

_He slides his gaze over her face, too intimate, too much like the night his mother had poisoned them. “You don’t want it, do you?”_

_“No.”_

_Lips turn upward into something of a kind sneer. A knowing sneer that promises too many things she wants to hope on. “Kol tells me also that you are sire bonded to Damon Salvatore.”_

_Her tongue curls against the roof of her mouth. She forces it out anyway, “Yes.”_

_His look is nothing short of appraising. As if he’s just now putting all the pieces of what she’s done since she’d figured out her way into his head. “Clever girl.”_

_She tightens her fingers in his hand and fights not to shiver._

 

 

 

Her spine feels broken against the rock where Shane has thrown her. Blood drains from her wrist to the ground, pooling in a stream that leads to where he needs it for Silas. Played, all of them, and no one had listened to anyone when they needed to. She’s not a stranger to death, not anymore. This time isn’t of her own will though, of her own plan, and she’s caught here bleeding out after being brought to this island.

She doesn’t remember much of what happens next. The film tape is too stretched out and her mind’s too fuzzy to comprehend. She knows that there’s fire, and Bonnie’s voice rising, and there’s shouting and Shane leading it all.

And then shouts of a different kind and two figures that move too quick for anyone’s eyes to follow.

There’s a vicious crack, a familiar sound to her as she’s felt the bones give before there on the human body, and she watches as Kol breaks Shane’s neck with a hard twist. A horrible noise comes from elsewhere then, a sound from someone she should know, but she can’t care.

Hands that she knows, that she welcomes, that she’s danced with, that she brought here, are on her then, picking her up and she relaxes for the first time in months.

 

 

 

_She’s in the boat. The same boat that brought them to the island, and she’s confused for a minute, till she realizes what she’s seeing. Her own body’s curled against Jeremy’s leg across from where a male hand holds tight to Rebekah next to him._

_She sighs and rests._

_Only later will she realize why her mind feels so empty and quiet._

 

 

 

Elena wakes with a start, muscles cramping and seizing as she jolts upward. She blinks, staring around her own bedroom at the walls filled with pictures and things. The house is quiet as her ears strain to pick up sound beyond the a/c and the refrigerator downstairs. Something and her head jerks to the slow beating of a heart that’s nearly too faint for supernatural ears.

Elijah sits in her window-seat, a tiny smile on his mouth. “You’re awake.”

“I am,” she says slowly. She stares at him, lips parted and slack as weeks of time slot into place in her head. “Oh god, everything that’s happened.” She blinks and looks down at her comforter, her mind clear and every emotion that’s been suppressed, every feeling, every thought, every want and will, rises one over another.

Looking up, she finds that he’s talking again. Telling her things about sire bonds and dreamwalking amongst vampires and the cure and Silas and how he’d found them and how the other Hunter they’d used to get to the island is gone and Damon’s gone and Bonnie’s fine and with Caroline-

She rises from the bed, slips out from the sheets, and fits her body to the line of his in the window-seat. “You came,” she says again and again against his neck. Her choice, her will, her want, her touch. hers.

His lips are dry against her skin. “I did. Clever girl.”

 

 

 

_She doesn’t dream of anything._


End file.
